Mr. Thierry H. was kind enough to post a comment with a nice little mod to the PERL round function I posted a while back. With his addition, you can now specify how many digits to show on the right of the decimal. Pretty neat, check it out.
apt-get quick reference
For all you Debian and Ubuntu nuts out there, and especially the newbies, there is a nice little apt-get quick reference that has been added to the library. Take a look and get to apt-ing!
New Firefox Extensions
Hello all, I have circled back around and added some new extensions or addons to the “Must Have Firefox Extensions” page. The ones that I have listed there are, in my opinion, still rock solid choices. However, some new stuff has come out and I wanted to add some goodies to the list. So, head on over and take a look, you might find something you didn’t know was out there. Don’t forget that we do update our information, so come back and check on it now and then to see what’s new!
New Feature At Solarum, Short Links are here!
A new feature has been added to the site, it’s for anyone that wants to use it and it’s totally free. I call it Short Links, and basically it’s a web site redirector. We all know it’s a pain in the rear to send those really long links to friends and family because they get wrapped and all munged up in the email and then don’t work. Then you are trying to copy and paste in notepad and put it all together or explain all this over the phone when mom calls and is clicking but not working. Yeah, we’ve all been there. So, what you can do here is enter your long web site link, hit the button and get a short one back. The short one you can send to whoever you want and when they go there it will re-direct them to your long link. It makes life easier all the way around. Simply go to our Tools section and click on the Short Links item from the list and go crazy. I hope you all enjoy this new feature!
Need some help with Java on Ubuntu?
Here are some tips for getting Sun Microsystem’s Java environment up and running smoothly on Ubuntu. This includes the JRE (Java Runtime Environment – for running Java apps) and the JDK (Java Development Kit – for creating Java apps). It’s actually easier than you think! Basically, add the universe repo and use synaptec. An added advantage is that you can install updates through there too.
Up2date versus yum
Well, this might be old news for some but maybe not for others so I thought I would share. I have been using RedHat (and its derivitives) for ten years or more now, so I have been real comfortable with up2date. In recent times, I knew yum was out there and you could use one or the other, but I stuck with up2date because after all, if it aint broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, then up2date broke. I noticed I was getting errors when trying to check for new updates and after a little research I found that the up2date repositories (for CentOS anyway) are gone, they removed them. This means that up2date is pretty much useless. I read up on yum a little bit and installed all of updates (by now there were quite a few that I needed) without a hitch, both in test and production. So, what I am passing on is that up2date has gone by the wayside, you might can get it to work again with a lot of tinkering, but my advice is to go ahead and make the switch to yum. You’ll be all the better and happier for it. From what I read, it does a better job of finding updates and dependancies as well. I certainly had no trouble with it (so far). You can run yum check-update to see if you have anything that needs to be updated, and yum update to get them. These are synonamous with up2date -l and up2date -u. Enjoy!